Abstract

We show that ultrahigh-Q wavelength-sized cavities can be reconfigurably formed by local refractive index tuning of photonic-crystal mode-gap waveguides. We have found that Q can be extraordinarily high (~5×109), which is much higher than that of structure-modulated mode-gap cavities. Furthermore, the required index modulation is extremely small (Δn/n~10-3), which enables dynamic cavity formation by fast optical nonlinearity. We numerically show that traveling photons in a waveguide can be pinned by fast local index tuning.

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